Full Citation
Title: “... Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise? Physical, Economic and Cognitive Effects of Early Life Conditions on Later Life Outcomes in the U.S., 1915-2005”
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2009
ISBN:
ISSN:
DOI:
NSFID:
PMCID:
PMID:
Abstract: Understanding the link between early and later circumstances is vital to enhancing our understanding of basic physiological, social, and economic mechanisms in operation over the entire life course, to identifying the protective factors that mitigate the negative effects of some early life experiences, and to designing effective interventions that reduce the long-term costs of adverse early life conditions. This project assesses how circumstances very early in life (e.g. economic privation, social isolation, proximity to environmental hazards or to medical care, exposure to unfavorable local disease environments) contribute to outcomes that are observed only decades later. It examines nationally representative data that follows several million individuals (who were born in the U.S. between 1895 and 1929 and who died in the U.S. between 1965 and 2006) from under age 5 until their death, with a wide range of information on early-life circumstances (at the individual, household, and community levels) and later life physiological, cognitive, and economic outcomes. This makes feasible for the first time linking early and later life circumstances across the twentieth century for a variety of sub-populations defined either in terms of demography (gender, race, specific birth cohort) or geography (region, city, neighborhood, block). The early-life information available for individuals includes exact place and date of birth, ethnicity, birth order, school attendance, the socio-economic status, ethnicity, and employment of both parents and neighbors, proximity to schools, stores, churches, and environmental hazards, and measures of the local disease environment. The later-life information includes adult height and weight, intelligence, educational and occupational attainment, income, disability, longevity, and specific cause of death.
Url: http://www.ucd.ie/t4cms/joe ferrie.pdf
User Submitted?: No
Authors: Ferrie, Joseph; Rolf, Karen; Troesken, Werner
Publisher: Northwestern University
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Fertility and Mortality, Health
Countries: United States